Our work offers the viewer two different ways of seeing the Landscape and our understanding of a connection to place.
As artists working full time at our practice, We find inspiration in the same place but our way of seeing is very different.
Olivia is a printmaker and drawer, working predominantly using copper plate etching, water colour and charcoal.
Lisa is an Oil Painter, working mostly on panel and canvas.
Time spent in the landscape on our family farm in the Southern Midlands surrounded by sheep, trees, bush and paddocks informs our work.
Artists across Tasmania present their own interpretation of the broad theme of water in any medium.
As an island we are surrounded by water so there is ample opportunity to capture its mood and beauty.
The Water Ways exhibition has artwork across all styles and media including painting, sculptures and photography. The works range from representational and abstraction to environmental commentary.
Art is for everyone. All artists create in an individual way and viewers will connect with a work for a very personal reason. Reflecting this unique but valid bond the major prize of $2000 will be decided not by judges, but by people’s choice vote. We invite visitors to engage with the art by voting for their favourite art work.
Prominent members of our community are asked to select their favourite artwork and give a reason for their choice. The diversity of choices is interesting to see.
Opening Event Friday 20 January 2023 6:00pm – 7:30pm Opening address by Dr Toby Juliff, Lecturer in Art at the School of Creative Arts and Media, UTAS
Chaos and order are two fundamental elements of lived experience, the two most basic subdivisions of the Self. The spaces between these elements are where life exists and where identity rests.
Experiences of Being is a group exhibition by Romany Best, Donna Bergshoeff and Skye Mescall exploring the concepts of order and chaos as they are linked with the creative identity. Through the mediums of painting and photography Best, Bergshoeff and Mescall explore how three different artists represent order and chaos within their work.
Best utilises her studio as a manifestation of her inner chaos, bursting with abandoned paintings, half-finished projects and canvases all in states of preparation. Her life, overflowing with unmanaged baggage, is represented by the anarchy of her studio.
Mescall works with stacks and files of images, lists and notes hoarded over years, layered and replicated, trying to find small glimpses of beauty in mess, order in chaos, finding how her creative identity exists within the liminal spaces.
Bergshoeff utilises photographic diptychs to play with the viewers’ way of seeing and our natural proclivity to create order out of chaos. She finds scenes where images of chaos exist next to scenes of order and plays with the spaces between asking the viewer to examine one state, then the other and finally the two as one image. Together these works explore how it is to inhabit shifting liminal spaces between order and chaos.
Opening Event Thursday 2 March 2023 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Waterforms is a series that investigates natural design. The paintings are impressionistic interpretations of segments of water views from Tasmanian places visited by emerging artist, Lynn Kelly.
Natural elements interact to control energy and atmosphere. Conditions can change quickly. Our environmental experiences are affected by times of day, weather and our points of view.
Likewise, in a painting the visual components are combined and arranged to express mood and movement.
These works are sections from water views removed from their scenic contexts. They are square in format, making them somewhat ambiguous.
Rather than making pictures the aim was to explore how colours and shapes can be composed to evoke a feeling and create the impression of a place.
Opening Event Thursday 16 March 2023 5:30pm – 7:30pm
An exhibition of contemporary mosaic works by Rachel Bremner, created to encourage the viewer to find personal meaning that resonates emotionally, without prompts, like listening to songs without words.
“From early childhood leading up to my life as a visual artist, I trained and performed as a professional violinist. I continue to be fascinated by the similarities, and the differences between the two forms of artistic expression.
I had never conceived of music as an art form that needed words to provide background or convey what I meant to express.
Expressing myself in words has never come easily to me, I can rarely find the right ones for my purpose, music was always a perfect medium for my intense sense of privacy. In music performance I could present my inner world to the audience, all my thoughts, reactions, emotions without having to describe the background story.
When I started to put my mosaic work out into the world, in contrast to music-making I struggled with the obligation in the art world to use words when presenting to an audience. I felt a growing conflict with the wordless immediacy with which I wanted to engage and how much words can interfere with that engagement.
I present this exhibition as an offering to the audience to pause, observe each work and examine emotional reactions in their own terms, with no titles, no accompanying prompts.” – Rachel Bremner
A pictorial journey through Hobart en plein air by Peter Rudd.
“My recent cityscapes depict the streets, buildings, parks and docks of Hobart. I like to paint outdoors because I am drawn to the colour of light at different times of day, and in different weather, and I want to translate my experience of looking at it into paint.
Painting these pictures has been my way of getting to know Hobart. I have chosen subjects which produce an emotional response in me, and which I feel express the charm of the city. I have especially enjoyed observing the layering of old and new architecture which can be seen in Hobart wherever one goes.” – Peter Rudd
A window into the influence of the natural world on our urban experience through light and our perception of time.
The installation, In Passing by SAC Resident Artist Christian Little, thematically explores time and our collective perception of the natural environment as ‘other’ in the urban landscape through a site-specific investigation of Salamanca. Utilising photographic imagery based within a systematic process of recording spaces throughout Salamanca repeatedly across months, documenting the natural change of weather, bloom, and decay.
Born from time in studio observing light cascade through the window from the courtyard outside. This installation draws attention to those unintentional moments spent in passing, encouraging an awareness of the ambient presence of the environment in our lives. Constructed using translucent acrylic sheets and paper, the materials and composition echo the original window experience of the artist. This collaboration with natural light changes the viewer’s perception of the installation throughout time of day and climate. Whilst the ephemeral quality of the semi-translucent photographs benefits from multiple viewings from different perspectives and an acute observation of nature’s aesthetic influence. Ultimately, ‘In Passing’ encourages a more intentional relationship with the surrounding processes of nature in the urban environment.
Opening Event Friday 3 February 2023 5:30pm 7:30pm
A whimsical, analogue, photographic reciprocation, along the river Seine, of the 1801 French voyage of exploration to Terra Australis and Van Diemens land led by Nicolas Baudin. By SAC Resident Artist Phillip England.
“The French voyage of discovery, led by Nicolas Baudin to Australia, including van Diemens Land in 1801 produced some iconic artwork depicting the marine and terrestrial flora and fauna they saw, the coastlines they mapped and the First Nations people they met. The voyage departed from Le Havre, the mouth of the Seine River which flows through Paris. My 2021 UTAS Rosamund McCulloch studio residency at la Cité internationale des arts in Paris became an artistic reciprocation of this voyage; an antipodean search for signs of life on the Seine river and documentation of my exploration of the river as it moves through Paris and where it meets the sea at La Havre.
I used monochrome, medium format film, exposed in a lensless panoramic pinhole camera, at sites along the Seine in Paris and at its mouth at Le Havre to evoke the water colour panoramas of Australian coastlines produced by the Baudin voyage artists Lesueur and Petit. The long exposure times required in pinhole photography remove human figures from the landscape, evoking the legal travesty, Terra Nullius, which drove European occupation of Australia, an already occupied land.
While in Paris, during a one week residency in the Ithaque gallery/darkroom, I made silver-gelatin photographic prints from a selection of these pinhole panoramas.
I also used instant film photography (Polaroid) to produce a series of triptychs at locations along the Seine River and I employed bleach reversal chemistry on medium format film photographs to produce monochrome, medium format positive slides, which are exhibited individually in light boxes.
The works in Terra Nullius reflect two predominant themes in my practice: 1) how the materiality of analogue and antique-process photography alters the psychology of space in imagery and 2) finding constructive emotional responses to humanity’s loss of close connection to the natural world.” – Phillip England
Launch Event Thursday 23 February 2023 6:00pm – 8:00pm
A capsule wardrobe of essential pieces that give form to the essence of urban living. Masculine shapes are softened with feminine detailing. The warmth of luxe wools, velvet, and the coolness of silk capture the feel of urban winter. Classic black, the warmth of sandstone and the coolness of midnight, reflect the winter cityscape. Inspired by classics and modern architectural minimalism. The merging of simplicity and timeless quality.
Vale is a collection of paintings by Lorna Quinn, created after an experience with a mountain plain in the Central Highlands in 2020.
“As a tourist looking in from a designated viewing platform, I found pleasure in imagining living on the slopes of the mountain as a bat or a worm or as a gust of wind. At the same time, I felt a sense of pain at the remoteness of this vision of dwelling – an absolute separateness from it. These two feelings, of inhabiting, and of outsideness, tangled together in a sort of ache, a longing, that I decided to represent in paint. Using a combination of holiday snaps, memory, and invention back at home, I repetitively formed and reformed the hills that I could remember in careful experiments with colour, texture and shade.
Returning to the viewing platform two years later, I found that my impression of the place had shifted. The idea of the mountain scene had grown so complete in its absence that the real thing felt pale and diminished, the paintings more concrete.” – Lorna Quinn
Lorna Quinn is a Melbourne based artist, creating small-scale portraits of vegetation, rock, earth and sky. Her practice considers the triangular relationship between landscape, personal experience and painting.